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*course

there's no such thing, there has never been any such thing? las, stop trolling :)

a good thing about the demoscene is that you can always break the rules.

debris won in the demo compo. craft won in the wild compo. untraceable got second in the 4k compo. realtime demo wannabe isn't even realtime.

if you have something interesting, just fuck the rules.

I never realized that releasing something with filesize <<Maximum is rule breaking.

Germans

@iq:

I said at least two, as I wasn't sure what you were using. Mentors 1k uses his 1k compresor, loonies were using their GLSL obfuscator/compressor (from the .nfo). Thats at least two.

chaos: Except that every one of your examples didn't break the rules at all, in fact they stayed within them with a sizable margin. :)

I could mention a certain production breaking rules here... but... I think it has been debated already ;)

and, please I perfectly get what choas means in his post when writing "breaking the rules" - aren't you a bit cavil here? :)

Imho the main reason for the downfall of 64ks was that they reached a level of visual/audio quality that made them undistinguishable from a 64MB demo (e.g. Fairlight's Deadringer or most Conspiracy productions). And with 4ks already starting to show the same qualities (e.g. Texas, Elevated, Sult) there is really no way that a change of the sizelimit (16k, 32k or 256k) will overcome this problem.

It might be helpful to set new artistic boundaries instead of filesize limits.
Why not combine the 64k category with the rules from Altparty's "Dynamic Demo" compos? Everytime the intro gets started the scenes are different, encouraging multiple views.
Or make a "64k without polygons/textures" or a "64k that shows only one evolving scene" compo that challenges the artistic visions of the creators? There are certain recent examples that show new interesting visual styles well suited to the 64k filesize and that kind of challenges: e.g. Atmta/Quite, Diatom/AndrOO or Nebula/Sqny.

Just my two cents, sorry. :-)

dont you dare kill off or mess with 64k just because the current generation isnt cool enough to handle it.. :)
its just how things are at the moment. the old timers quit the division or scaled back their involvement; the newbies havent quite caught up to the level. (but there are signs of the green shoots of recovery. see e.g. approximate at bp09, and watch that space in a couple of years)
but then, things in 4k look a lot more rosy right now because of a few danes, norwegians and a spaniard. thats what happens in the demoscene. we could be talking about a dearth of good 4ks and a dead category when those guys get tired in a couple of years.
(and its not like the democompos of recent times have been too cool either.)

the demoscene is organic. it grows because somebody decides one day to do something cool in some area or other, and others follow. im quite sure that over time the focus will shift - it doesnt require new catgeories or messing with the rules to force that.

half-trolling idea:

why not trying a new compo where intros are allowed to stream their dynamic content from a lan repository or live party cams, or even from the net ?

they could be called "feed demos" or "net demos" :D

How would that be separate from an actual demo, with the exception of seeing buffering errors and needing to write a lot of boring code?

Preacher: the content is dynamic and quite unpredictable, for example you could ask the party participants to upload some photos, or you could leech random pictures from google images according to a theme parameter entered in the launch panel :D

Altparty has had a competition like this, and we at Icons also allowed the use of an Internet connection. The combined number of entries that actually did something with the concept: 0.

But yes, it's a nice idea. Maybe I myself should do something with it..

gloom: I think "rules" was meant as "conventions" here...

This can only mean Farbrausch are working on a 16k intro!

Because right now even with predictable static content there are enough high-quality, well-designed productions? :)

But.. but the final version of kkrieger isn't even out yet.

The whole point of making a demo is to make something that looks and behaves exactly like YOU want it to. I don't see what a internet-slideshow-viewer has to do with a demo.

"I'm going to spend a month modelling this perfect 3D room, to act as a backdrop for my killer water-effect... and then I'm going to pick textures for it at random from images.google.com!!!1111". No. :)

so is the popular demo II...

in fact we're working on 4096 of them simultaneously, all in one single file, and each of them only runs if all the other 4095 are there too, and together they behave just like it was one single demo.

it's some pretty nifty engineering if i may say so myself.

I call troll! Of course nobody would be doing that. Think something like ASD's Evolution of Vision.

Anyway, I would welcome 16k with open arms as a replacement for 64k. It is open to artistic input, advanced meshes, and not the least technically challening, but without all the expectations of the 64k category. I could see it becoming very popular.

I can't really distinguish 64k's from demos anyway - size is a positive factor, but it has been a long time is I have been very impressed by it, save for Panic Room which took a fuckton of effort to do. I would much rather have a better viewing experience at the cost of a few megabytes than what 64k offers today.

I'm trying hard to find a good argument against 16k's, but I haven't got anything yet.

There aren't any widely available good enough music playback solutions for that category. V2 is too big, Protrekkr is too big and most 4k synths just wouldn't cut it there. Of course, you can roll out your own, but the barrier of entry is all too much higher for people who don't have their own synth or someone interested in making one.

(disclaimer: If there are, please do let me know)

I guess somebody will eventually be kind enough to release a decent synth. I would be surprised if it didn't happen.